How Insight Pest Is Reinventing Employee Engagement

Canada’s fastest-growing pest control company is cracking the code on a challenge that plagues many companies across service industries: how to truly engage employees. The benefits are obvious – a more engaged workforce is a more invested workforce, which can be connected to metrics like better employee retention and improved productivity.

While traditional pest control companies may rely on outdated and anecdotal performance management approaches – tracking only customer complaints and basic completion rates for jobs – Insight Pest has pioneered a sophisticated employee engagement model that gives every technician clear visibility into their performance, specific pathways to advancement and objective metrics that directly impact their compensation.

This model began with a vision for an “everything app” that would serve as a wrapper on top of other applications and streamline everything from employee onboarding to daily performance tracking, propagating information across all company systems. This kind of undertaking required access to integrated and curated data. Already a user of WorkWave’s PestPac pest control software, Insight Pest became an early adopter participant of the Wavleytics business intelligence and analytics program. This suite of advanced BI tools includes Data Factory, a comprehensive data warehousing solution that provides neatly formatted and curated data, enabling companies to bypass infrastructure setup and get straight to the data.

Now, Insight Pest’s vision is fast becoming reality, and it’s setting a new standard for how service companies can motivate and develop their workforce. 

Stepping Away From Performance Uncertainty

Before beginning work on their groundbreaking idea, Insight Pest was managing employee engagement in much of the same ways as traditional pest companies, where good work was often assumed in the absence of customer complaints.The problem is that anecdotal feedback, even on the off-chance that it’s provided in the form of a positive review, rarely tells the whole story and can miss critical data about service completion times, callback rates and other objective performance indicators.

This uncertainty can create a frustrating cycle. At Insight Pest, leadership knew that if employees couldn’t gauge their own performance and managers couldn’t provide meaningful feedback, there would be a risk of stagnated employee performance, both from a company perspective and for those employees looking to advance their careers. 

Creating a Vision for Clear Performance Visibility

Everything changed when Insight Pest began tracking detailed performance metrics for each technician, creating a leaderboard where employees could see exactly how they were performing relative to their peers. The leaderboard goes several steps beyond just a ranking system, though – it also provides concrete feedback about performance so that team members can understand exactly what specific actions they can take to improve their ranking. 

This transparency eliminated the guesswork and assumptions that stemmed from previous anecdotal performance discussions. Now, objective data validates employee efforts and highlights specific areas needing attention, giving the team a clear path forward for improvement.  

This approach proved incredibly motivating for Insight Pest. When employees could see their performance compared to colleagues, the buy-in to climb the rankings was immediate.

“It’s really helped get our technicians excited and involved in their day-to-day work. We’re tying various incentives to these stats – they might get an extra day off, or a cash bonus if they hit a certain threshold. The buy-in from our teams has been massive.” – Matteo Stradiotto, National Manager, Insight Pest

Rethinking Compensation and Owning Your Own Earning Potential

Access to detailed performance data has enabled Insight Pest to begin to push the envelope on traditional compensation methods. They’re exploring and pioneering fair compensation models that reward high performers without hurting company profitability.

“We think a key part of being advocates of our team is to continuously explore the question of  how we can increase money-making opportunities for our staff,” Stradiotto says. 

It’s an easier question to answer for certain roles than others. In sales, for example, if an employee wants to make more money, they can make more sales and earn more commission as a direct outcome. For frontline technicians, though, it’s harder to peg down a straightforward equation.

“If someone wants a raise as a technician, I need to know as a manager what is our break even on that truck,” Stradiotto notes.”How much product are they using? How much time do they spend driving? What’s their average completion rate? What’s the price of gas? What’s the price of that vehicle?”

Now, Insight Pest has ready access to answers for questions like these, using Wavelytics Data Factory as their foundational data source. This comprehensive data warehouse provides Stradiotto’s team with the information needed to calculate the true cost and revenue associated with each technician’s work. Now, they’re building meaningful compensation models where employees understand exactly what performance improvements will lead to higher pay, creating transparency that empowers team members to control their own earning potential.

The results speak for themselves: the company has doubled in size every year since launching in 2020. “Now, we’re getting an amazing level of engagement and increased efficiency out of our technicians,” says Matteo Stradiotto, National Manager at Insight Pest. “It’s a massive achievement.” 

A Partnership Powered by Innovation

Insight Pest notes that WorkWave’s Wavelytics platform provided the infrastructure needed to maintain their employee engagement approach as their company continues to grow. But according to Stradiotto, it’s not just the Wavleytics solutions themselves that add value – it’s the people behind them.

“We’ve been meeting regularly with the people who actually have their hands in the code,” Stradiotto says. “We have a lot of core people involved in these conversations and the active development of the solution. It’s exciting, because it really does mean that this will be something unique created to meet the needs of our industry and our company.” 

Beyond Metrics: A Cultural Transformation

The shift to data-driven employee engagement has changed company culture around recognition and advancement. Both carry more weight because they’re based on objective achievements employees can verify themselves.

Looking ahead, Stradiotto envisions a workplace where every employee will have complete clarity about their performance and exactly what actions will lead to their goals, whether that’s increased compensation, advancement or other opportunities. Insight Pest plans to use Data Factory to integrate data from multiple sources, including GPS tracking, communication platforms and other operational systems, to create an even more complete picture of employee development opportunities and performance.

For other service companies struggling with employee engagement and retention, Insight Pest’s approach demonstrates that innovation plays an important part – something that comprehensive data infrastructure like Wavelytics is helping to make possible.


Interested in learning more about Data Factory and more Wavelytics capabilities? Contact us today.

Insight Pest Canada is the country’s fastest-growing and largest residential pest control provider. Known for their “youth movement” and fresh approach to the industry, Insight Pest incorporates cutting-edge technology, like Wavelytics, across their entire operation to deliver exceptional customer service experience while maintaining a great quality of life for their technicians. The company has doubled in size every year since launching in 2020 and its rapid growth is driven by its commitment to smooth operations, innovative technology adoption, and a team that brings energy and new perspectives to traditional pest control services.